There's a lot of truth here. I first became conscious of the hypocrisy of neoconservatives -- at the time my friends and allies-- when I saw how viciously they went after immigration restrictionists in the 1990's. Their views for the United States were exactly the opposite of those they defended for Israel. Spencer is an extremist, of course, but seeking some degree of national self-preservation is not extreme, imo. Rather hope there is a middle ground forged between extreme multiculturalism and neo-Nazism/civil war, rather like social democracy was forged somewhere between unbridled capitalism and Leninism.

When did pro-Palestinian activists decide that Israeli injustice was not just a thing in itself, to be condemned on its own terms, but needed to be connected to some random American left wing cause (claiming cops are racist murderers, or some silly thing about apartment rentals) to be effective?
Doesn't work with me, makes me more sanguine about what I know to be an injustice.

Nice photo of Ivanka. On twitter, there's a new right wing account called "Ivanka Defense Force". I kind of like it despite the obvious acronym evocation. Still have hopes for Trump, though ready for disappointment.

Agree with Sally. There's a real chance for a better American foreign policy--not for IP, but for the region. Battle for Trump's ear is intense right now. A little sad to see so much of Mondoweiss has bought into a Clintonesque narrative as Trump as some kind of Nazi brute. Get a grip guys, he's a NY real estate guy, and for all the obvious vulgarity, you don't rise in that world being that kind of person. I think you all probably know that.

OK. But can we please acknowledge that if Palestinians had the same legal rights, opportunities, (not to mention affirmative action benefits) as African-Americans, their life would be comparatively paradise?

Great informative piece, pulling together relevant strands that many sensed, but hadn't pulled together. I wonder if Obama had urged Biden to run, might have avoided this. Steve Walt should realize Trump was joking. The kind of faux literalness of media and many commentators is distressing, somewhat disingenuous. Not to deny that Trump is self-destructing, though.

Thanks, interesting. Attending Presbyterian Church a factor in making me attentive to injustices in Palestine. Twenty years ago.But I can see how this group (faith, denomination) could be detoured from a struggle that might piss off friends, colleagues, etc. And of course, there are all these other issues, which only cause bewilderment, and generate no hostile pushback. What is the oppression of Palestinians compared to the T's????

Well Trump obviously doesn't know or care too much, so I'll take his "let them annex the West Bank" as 1) contempt for the corrupt PA and 2) an anti-Zionist strategy designed to stop sparing Israel the costs of occupation and 3) further delegitimizing Israel.

It would be nice to find the clip from several months ago when Matthews, late on a primary night on MSNBC, and not on set, said Cruz was signaling he was going for the hawk vote, to "fight wars for Israel." Brian Williams, in the studio, asked Matthews what he was drinking in that coffee cup.

Terrific talk, I bet it was very persuasive. Congratulations for pursuing your curiosity,and sense of right and wrong, in a meaningful and effective way. Your generation of American Jews can play a big and necessary historical role in moving towards greater justice on this really important issue. We Christians can't seem to do it, and certainly not by ourselves.

Re above commenters: It seems pretty silly to ignore anti-Semitism, a huge historical force even if it plays virtually no role in contemporary American life.

In terms of American politics, Trump is essentially a liberal Zionist, meaning that he believes America should exist with moderate concessions to multiculturalism. That's essentially my position with regard to Israel. Perhaps the most typical AIPAC position is that Israel should be a totally Jewish state with apartheid features, while any American attempt to control its borders is racist/fascist. Or perhaps that's the Rachel Maddow position, whom we've been discussing this evening in my house: Trump is a fascist, Israel is never mentioned.

So here we have Mondoweiss allying itself with rich right wing Republicans http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/21/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-donors.html?ref=politics&_r=0 against Donald Trump, the first antiwar Republican with a real chance at the nomination since forever. North talks about AIPAC as if it's Daddy, "legitimating" Donald Trump. He puts the powerful war-mongering group in the role of our moral arbiter, over a guy who is fumbling way is trying to run a populist, pro working class campaign. How revealing. How sad!

Not that it's central to your point, but am curious about your ideological distinction between Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as if Rubin were further or more doctrinaire left. Missed that at the time, but I was just a kid. Rubin as I recall tried to become a yuppie entrepreneur, and Abbie died a rebel. (Is my memory correct on that?)

WASHINGTON, D.C. [1/22/16] -- The lights are burning late in Davos tonight.

At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided "fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views."

Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.

But set aside Joe's slurs -- demagogues, xenophobia.

Who really belongs in the dock here? Who caused this crisis of political legitimacy now gripping the nations of the West?

Was it Donald Trump, who gives voice to the anger of those who believe themselves to have been betrayed? Or the elites who betrayed them?

Can that crowd at Davos not understand that it is despised because it is seen as having subordinated the interests of the nations and people in whose name it presumes to speak, to advance an agenda that serves, first and foremost, its own naked self-interest?

The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altars of globalization and a New World Order.

No more astute essay has been written this political season than that of Michael Brendan Dougherty in "The Week," where he describes how, 20 years ago, my late friend Sam Francis predicted it all.

In Chronicles magazine, in March 1996 ("From Household To Nation"), Francis, a paleoconservative and proud son of the South, wrote:

"Sooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interest and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better."

What we saw through a glass darkly then, we now see face to face.

Is not Trump the personification of the populist-nationalist revolt Francis predicted?

And was it not presidents and Congresses of both parties who mired us in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and negotiated the trade deals that have gutted American industry?

The bleeding of factories and manufacturing jobs abroad has produced the demoralization and decline of our middle class, along with the wage stagnation and shrinking participation in the labor force.

Is Trump responsible for that? Is Socialist Bernie Sanders, who voted against all those trade deals?

If not, who did this to us?

Was it not the Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats?

Americans never supported mass immigration.

It was against their will that scores of millions, here legally and illegally, almost all from Third World countries, whose masses have never been fully assimilated into any western nation, have poured into the USA.

Who voted for that?

Religious, racial, cultural diversity has put an end to the "bad" old America we grew up in, as we evolve into the "universal nation" of Ben Wattenberg, who once rhapsodized, "The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality."

James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyite and Cold War geo-strategist whose work Francis admired, called liberalism "the ideology of Western suicide."

If the West embraces, internalizes and operates on the principles of liberalism, Burnham wrote, the West with meet an early death.

Among the dogmas of liberalism is the unproven assumption that peoples of all nationalities, tribes, cultures, creeds can coexist happily in nations, especially in a "creedal" nation like the USA, which has no ethnic core but rather is built upon ideas.

A corollary is that "diversity," a new America and new Europe where all nations are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual, is the future of the west and the model for mankind.

Yet, large and growing minorities in every country of Europe, and now in America, believe that not only is this proposition absurd, the end result could be national suicide.

And when one considers the millions who are flocking to Trump and Sanders, it is hard to believe that the establishments of the two parties, even if they defeat these challengers, can return to same old interventionist, trade, immigration and war policies.

For Trump is not the last of the populist-nationalists.

Given his success, other Republicans will emulate him. Already, other candidates are incorporating his message. The day Francis predicted was coming appears to have arrived.

Angela Merkel may have been Time's Person of the Year in 2016, but she will be lucky to survive in office in 2017, if she does not stop the invasion from Africa and the Middle East.

Yet Joe Biden's dismissal that it is reactionaries who oppose what the progressives of Davos believe is not entirely wrong. For as Georges Bernanos wrote, when Europe was caught between Bolshevism and fascism: To be a reactionary means simply to be alive, because only a corpse does not react any more - against the maggots teeming on it.
###

@Kris, who notes Sanders and Clinton poll leads over Trump:
Can't tell much at this stage; in January 1980, Carter had lead of 60-31 versus Reagan.
I think Trump might well win against Hillary, though the establishment pushback against him would be formidable. I think some people think it would be like Johnson v. Goldwater, but Hillary is such a fundamentally weaker candidate than LBJ was in 1964. Compared to more recent elections, Trump would do much better with blacks than McCain or Romney and obviously much better with working class whites. The GOP in last few elections has stood for lower capital gains taxes and support for Israel--its main positions. Not that appealing to that many people.

Prof Falk,
I'd like to ask to reconsider and possibly soften your view of Trump as an unreconstructed demagogue out to demonize the other, etc. In my view a president who is a little bit more nationalist might well be less interventionist and less warlike. Trump's desire to slow down immigration, if sometimes expressed extremely, is a pretty reasonable measure to deal with growing domestic inequality, collapse of working class wages. A recent article contrasted the hysteria which greeted Trump's temporary pause on visas proposal with the general indifference American elites feel about policies which kill or uproot hundreds of thousands of Muslims:http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-and-the-riot-of-the-elites/ I don't expect you or anyone here to be actually friendly towards Trump, but the policies he expounds are it seems to me in most ways more humanistic than Hillary's, not to mention other Republicans.

I could be wrong, but everything I sense about Trump is that Adelson would be stupid to back him. Opposition to Iraq war/ opposition to overthrow of Assad/refusal to commit to "united" Jerusalem under Israeli control/refusal to commit to W's "commitments" to Ariel Sharon/ etc. Trump is polite/friendly with Adelson because they kind of speak the same mogul developer language, and Trump isn't looking for a fight with the Israel lobby. But he is less likely to do the Lobby's bidding than anyone running except, maybe, Sanders, IMHO.

eljay,
I was being sarcastic with all my 3 comments, my pathetic little resort when irritation gets the best of me. I'm a antiwar, pro justice in Palestine, skeptical about globalization conservative in general, and would back either Sanders or Trump, would prefer the non-bombastic Sanders.

The fact that they (the white, uneducated Trump supporters) don't understand that everyone in the world has a constitutional right to immigrate to America shows they don't understand who we are as a country.

Bombing Muslims is A-OK. Destroying their countries, subsidizing their oppression in Israel, international economic sanctions (half a million dead under Clinton, says Albright, worth the price) hardly a peep. But suggesting that maybe their immigration to United States be slowed for a bit (perhaps until the quite justifiable resentment dies down)--Oh that's HATE!!!! Bret Stephens is furious at Trump, I hear.

Welcome Tova. Mondoweiss is a pretty big tent; I'm a friend of the site who doesn't believe that nationalism is always fundamentally wrong--though of course it often is. And patriotism, cousin to nationalism, often is not wrong. Your raising of the subject reminds me of my teenage arguments with a Philadelphia girl (Ardmore, went to Baldwin--is that familiar territory to you?). But in those days if one said Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, that would be a way of complimenting him.

I do think the mentality which considers Israeli nationalism good and every other one is bad is fundamentally untenable--for American foreign policy as well as for Israel's victims--though that seems to me to be dominant view of elites in this country.

Excellent statement. At the risk of irritating some folks here, I would note that so much of what passes for progressive campus activism these days involves suppression of or protest against free speech. I think the classical liberal position is the correct one, and that the oppressed need and can benefit from free speech as much or more than anyone, and I imagine that Palestine solidarity kids on campus recognize that.
I note that one of the complaints used by right wing Zionist students at Berkeley to suppress activism was that mock checkpoints used to illustrate what Palestinians face every day made them feel "unsafe."

I've debated this subject before and don't want to repeat myself. But I did find myself wondering what Youseff Munnayer, or any young Palestinian intellectual in or close to an American university environment, might really think about the current wave of campus unrest--the frenzied agitation against Halloween costumes, the demands for "safe space", the desperate search for words from liberal campus administrators that might show offense, the palpable discomfort with free speech. Not what they say, but what they really think.

A lot of it is change. How many people who comment here would been interested or knowledgeable enough fifteen years ago? Or twenty? Not me, certainly, though I was an educated, politically engaged person.

Rob, This was one of the most fun to read posts I've seen in a long time. I would really love to have been at that event. Your description of the scrum surrounding you after your intervention reminds me of something which still seems to be basically true (to the extent I can see, as a gentile not hanging around with all that many Jews these days): probably at the center of the community is a sense that though they "love Israel" they realize that something is deeply wrong with it, and want somehow to make it right. And are looking to you to help resolve the perhaps irresoluble contradictions. Not sure if this sentiment is strong enough to be politically useful, and lead to liberation of Palestine (and of Israelis too).

I haven't looked at the comments, but there are hundreds of (paid) Zionist commenters who do this sort of thing; the ones who work mondoweiss are probably the creme de la creme. I doubt Yacov Yerdeny is a regular Elle reader.

Thanks for posting this. I knew this stuff was out there, but with the American media reporting 100 times an hour Netanyahu government claims to the contrary, posts like this are important and necessary.

I know the 2ss is unlikely. But it could, in principle, right now be imposed by the US and EU in a year's time. And that would save both parties a bloody, generation long civil war with an unknown outcome.

One never knows whether signers such as Rowling oppose the boycott (which I feel ambivalent about) and favor genuine negotiations, forcing a viable two state solution, or are just pretending to favor negotiations, and actually favor status quo and occupation.
I'd give Thatcher more of a pass-- she did quite forcefully support two states rhetorically, which was more than other Western leaders were willing to do during her era. I know she is a demon figure to the left, but on Israel Palestine, her views were relatively good. http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/11/back-when-an-ally-challenged-israel/

I hadn't noticed Trump's were placed there. Not sure really that they are. He's lived his whole life in partnership and competition with Jews as pushy as he is: not sure exactly where that would situate him on this issue and related Mideast stuff, but my hunch is --he won't be obsequious or deferential. But probably genuinely knows and likes some pretty right-wing Jews.

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